Ellen Key

Ellen Key (1849–1926) was a Swedish writer whose views on family, ethics and education made her a prominent figure of the Modern Breakthrough movement in Scandinavian literature. She is remembered above all as an early advocate of putting the child at the centre of education, and for her arguments that motherhood deserved social and state support, ideas that still feed debates on family policy.

She was born at Sundsholm, a manor in Småland, into a well-off family; her father was a founder of the Swedish Agrarian Party and a regular newspaper contributor. Key was taught mainly at home, by her mother and a foreign governess. When she was twenty the family moved to Stockholm, where she could make use of the city's libraries. In the 1870s her politics were strongly liberal. Through the following decade her reading of Darwin, Spencer and Huxley, together with a growing doubt about the Christian upbringing she had received, pushed her towards socialism.

In the 1880s she taught at a people's school, helped found the women's society Nya Idun and took part in the salons hosted by Calla Curman. She worked as a teacher until 1900, when the success of her writing on education led her to lecture in Sweden and abroad. Her thinking joined individualism, a view of aesthetics as a means of human elevation and a critical stance towards traditional schooling. In Love and Marriage she argued that women could reach their full human development through motherhood, while insisting that the state should cushion the economic dependence that childrearing created. The book also called for open recognition of female sexuality, which scandalised defenders of conventional morality.

Her legacy lies between pedagogy and social policy. She is counted among the forerunners of the New School movement and of the idea that childhood deserves its own consideration. Her proposals for state support of mothers and children influenced social legislation in several countries. Writers such as Selma Lagerlöf and Elin Wägner acknowledged her influence, and Maria Montessori recalled her prediction that the twentieth century would be the century of the child.